ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a 7-bit code, which is the lower half to many newer character sets. An ASCII table is available at www.asciitable.com or by excetuting "man ascii" on a *nix. The ASCII manual page first appeared in version 7 of AT&T UNIX.

Contrary to popular belief, binary is not a secret code thought up and used by hackers. Infact, binary itself has nothing to do with text. Binary is a number system of base 2. Because binary is actually a number system, letters cannot be converted directly to binary. An assosiation table of numbers and letters, called a codepage is used. ( i.e. a=1, b=2... ).

Because ASCII is a 7-bit code, this translator does not pad translated characters with zeroes for the purpose of forming a complete 8-bit byte. It can translate into any base number system, 2 through 36. The number of digits used per translated character varies between bases. This number is decided on the fly by calculating the length of 127 in the new base. ( 127 is the highest number in ASCII. ) In any base above 11, two digits will be used per character.